


Two Hearts

by girlpire



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Awkward Romance, Bittersweet Ending, Episode Fix-It: s04e13 Journey's End, F/M, Fix-It, Het sex (not graphic)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-27
Updated: 2020-09-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:28:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26686666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlpire/pseuds/girlpire
Summary: She wondered if he resented the proper Doctor as much as she did for what he did to them both, for leaving them there together to make do however they could.
Relationships: Metacrisis Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler, Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler, The Doctor (Doctor Who)/Rose Tyler
Comments: 9
Kudos: 21





	Two Hearts

*  
  
The day the proper Doctor dropped them off in Bad Wolf Bay and flew away in the TARDIS forever, she had actually been happy for one short moment. It was the human in her, the part that craved love and the words that go with it. She stood there on the beach and listened to the only thing she'd been wanting to hear him say for the last two years, and then she kissed him the way she'd always wanted to, held him close and pushed her fingers through his hair. And it was perfect, but when she looked into his eyes, she was startled to find that she'd been kissing someone she didn't know. The real Doctor had already left her again, and it occurred to her right away that the real him wouldn't have said it, wouldn't have needed to say it, _didn't_ say it, and the man standing next to her only did because he knew it had to be said. He had no other choice. He'd been abandoned although he was too human to be left alone, and she felt sorry for him, she really did, but the fact was that the man who stayed behind wasn't the man she fell in love with.  
  
It took them two days to get back home from Norway. First they walked to the nearest town and her mum called her dad to get him to arrange a flight for the next day, and they spent the night in a hotel on credit. They got two rooms, one for her mum and one for her and... him, because her mum knew how long she'd wanted this, to be with him. But the two of them sat in the hotel room and only talked, and he tried to reassure her that he was still himself - the same way that he had when she first saw him regenerate - but he kept using slang she'd never heard him use before, and when she couldn't find the key to the minibar, she saw him reach into his pocket for his screwdriver, look confused for a moment, and then frown. He didn't say much after that, and they went to sleep on separate beds, and in the morning he followed her and her mum through the airport with an expression on his face that she could almost have called regret, until she took his hand. That, at least, made him smile.  
  
The first week or so was alright; it was like a holiday. She showed him around her world the way he used to show her around other worlds, and for a few moments here and there, she almost let herself believe everything was the way it should be. She found herself thinking she was with the real Doctor a few times, and they kept up a [mostly] innocent flirtation, which was fun, but at night they would return to the flat she'd been sharing with Mickey, and she'd remember again where they were and whom she was with. He spent nights on her sofa, and little by little she packed up Mickey's things, and she didn't want to talk about trading Mickey for this man, even though she knew she'd made that trade a long time ago, so they didn't talk about it, and she found herself feeling foolish for taking him out to buy souvenirs from a world that they would never leave.  
  
And he started to get restless. After a few weeks of his sleeping on her sofa, she woke one night to the quiet sound of the balcony door opening and shutting. She followed him outside in her pajamas, and he glanced her way and then up at the stars, and she knew he could still name every single one of them, name them, count them, and qualify them, but he could never ever touch them again. He told her, "I didn't take you to Roravenia. A night-blooming planet. Imagine that, a whole planet that blooms at night. Of course, it's raging sandstorms all day, barely habitable, everything lives below ground, but... at night, it's one of the most beautiful places in the universe. Never took anyone there, actually; I suppose I'd been saving it, but now..."  
  
"Shh," she said, and took his hand. And he looked down at his hand - it was _that_ one - and she led him back inside by the only part of him that she was certain she loved, and in the bed that Mickey didn't share anymore, she tried to comfort him. It was hard to see him so sad; he looked like the proper Doctor, after all. And before she fell asleep, she put her head on his chest, and she listened to his one heartbeat, a constant, steady reminder that her real love was still very far away. Perhaps on Roravenia this very moment. And even though she had a near-him underneath her cheek, she wished guiltily for much more, for the screwdriver and the TARDIS and all the stars in the sky, and for his other heart.  
  
She'd been given paid leave for saving the whole of reality, but eventually she did have to go back to work. She took him with her, and it was nice for him; he fell immediately into his comfortable role as Cleverer Than Everyone Else Even You Yes You There. But there weren't currently any alien threats - Earth appeared to be keeping a low profile for once. And all of the top secret projects were primitive to him. He solved a few of their production troubles and convinced them to abandon certain things that weren't worth toying with, but, as she had feared, without any sort of trouble to get into, he soon became bored. Or... not bored exactly; he was always finding things about the human race to exclaim over and call brilliant, but she could tell his wanderlust had kicked into high gear. The truth was that he was too big for his own skin.  
  
She took more time off. They went to China, Spain, Alaska, Egypt, Russia, and Brazil. In that order. But it seemed the more they traveled, the less satisfied they were - both of them. The world was so terribly small and crowded. She bought him a telescope, and he did something to it that she didn't understand but made it much more powerful, and they spent hours looking through it and talking about other places - which was all fine as they were doing it, but seemed to make him sad immediately afterwards. He always stayed outside long after she went to bed. Sometimes they had sex on her balcony, but not very often. He got distracted by the stars.  
  
Very early one morning as they were lying in bed, her head on his chest listening to that one heart, he said to her, "You never say my name, Rose. Why is that?"  
  
And she said, "Don't I?"  
  
And he said, "Never. Not once since I came here."  
  
And there was that heartbeat thumping softly, and she said, "Well, let's be honest, it's not much of a name, is it?" And she was joking, sort of.  
  
He said, "You never had any trouble with it before."  
  
"I don't have trouble with it now," she said.  
  
"I just thought, if you wanted to give me a new name... one that you don't mind saying..."  
  
"Don't be ridiculous. I'm not changing your name," she said.  
  
"You could call me Alonzo," he said, and he said it like he'd like for her to, but she knew he wouldn't. "Or Christophe, or Jeremy, or Franz - isn't that a good name, Franz? I'd quite like to be called Franz."  
  
She laughed softly. "I'm not calling you Franz."  
  
"What will you call me, then?" he asked her.  
  
And she said, "You're the Doctor, of course." But as she said it, it felt very, very wrong. And she realized that she _hadn't_ said that name at all since that day on the beach a few months ago, and how was that even possible? Surely she'd introduced him to people? But she knew she hadn't said it because she didn't really believe it, didn't believe his name because it wasn't really him. He was only a piece of the real thing, a copy, given to her to take care of like a pet, and now she was even supposed to name it. How could the real Doctor have ever thought he was doing her a favor?  
  
After that, it was harder. She thought, maybe if they got a new place, together, one where she'd never spent hours imagining what it would be like to be with him again, one she'd never shared with anyone else... so they moved. Clear across London. And it wasn't a flat; it was a house with a yard. With a place to go up on the roof and look at the stars.  
  
He stayed up on the roof all night sometimes. Sometimes he went up during the day as well to look through his telescope. "Come on, come and eat breakfast," she would go up to say, or, "Don't you think it's time for bed now?" and he'd say, "Tonight they'll be celebrating the new millennium on Zelphi. Fireworks like supernovas. It won't get dark there for weeks..."  
  
And there was no help for it. He couldn't get the whole of space and time out of his head, no matter how human his body was. He clung to her some nights like she could make it alright, as though she could go on comforting him forever and that would be enough. "Kreefink," he murmured one night, pressing himself into her soft, naked body on the roof of their little house. "I never took you to Kreefink during summer. I never... the twin planets, Fellina and Spreph. I didn't take you to Fellina and Spreph, how could we have missed Fellina and Spreph?" and she pushed her fingers through his hair, kissed his mouth so he would stop talking. It worked for a while, but then, "Hnelik," he muttered against her neck on a slow slide out. The next thrust, he said, "Jamburg."  
  
"It doesn't matter," she whispered, but he didn't hear her.  
  
"Crelt. Yoomina. Shiafa." He said their names like they were his children. "The red moon of Gibbony. It's... we missed the red moon of Gibbony, Rose, I never showed you the..."  
  
"I don't care," she said.  
  
"...only moon in the universe that is actually a living, breathing..."  
  
"Shhh..."  
  
But he went on naming them, the places they'd never been, could never go, and it broke her heart that the Doctor, the proper one, could do something this awful to anyone. As much as he'd been given to her as a gift, for this man, staying with her was only a punishment.  
  
He cried as he came inside her, and she wrapped her arms around him and held him until the tears stopped. And when he finally fell asleep, his one heart beating softly beside her one heart, so close they could have been inside one body, she looked up at the stars that seemed so much farther away than they used to and thought about running.  
  
"You still think about him, don't you?" he asked one day.  
  
"Think about who?" she said, although she already knew; she'd been thinking about him just then.  
  
"Me."  
  
"Of course I think about you," she said.  
  
"You know what I mean." He looked at her eyes, that frank expression that didn't usually make her feel guilty and said, as though it were fact, "You don't love me."  
  
Her mouth opened for a moment, then closed so she could clear her throat. "Don't be stupid," she said.  
  
"I understand," he went on. Then, "No, wait, I don't understand. I had thought... but it doesn't matter now, what matters is that you're unhappy. And I can't go on making you unhappy like this, Rose. I can't."  
  
"I'm not unhappy," she said. "And I do love you."  
  
"No, you don't."  
  
"Do so. How can you know what I'm feeling, anyway?"  
  
He sighed and ran a hand through his hair, making it stick up crazily. "Because you loved me before. And it feels different now."  
  
"No it doesn't. Feels just the same to me."  
  
"Does it? Does this feel the same to you as it did in the TARDIS? When we could go anywhere, do anything we wanted? On the third ring of Dorrow at sunset, with lightening beetles flickering through the crystal trees like stars under water? Or in the jungles of the Panjassic Asteroids, in the midst of the Forest of Cheem? You loved me then, Rose Tyler. You loved me when I was an alien in a spaceship, but now that I've only got one heart to give to you--"  
  
"That's not it," she said. "That's not..." But she couldn't look at him.  
  
He swallowed. "I'll get my things. And I'll go."  
  
"No, you don't have to leave," she said.  
  
He was still giving her that intense look, the one that made entire races tremble. "Yes," he said. "I do."  
  
So he left, and she didn't see him again for a very long time. And she kept thinking he would show up again, that maybe she would come home from work and he would be at the house, on the roof looking through his telescope, or maybe rigging up a laser beam out of her microwave, but he never did. And after a few months, she packed up and moved back to her old flat, and she stopped asking people if they'd heard from him, and she wondered if he resented the proper Doctor as much as she did for what he did to them both, for leaving them there together to make do however they could.  
  
It was an awkward meeting three years later when she found him again. She'd taken her mum's digital camera to a shop to get it fixed, and when she went to pick it up, there he was. His nametag said John. "You don't work here, do you?" she asked, and he said, "I wouldn't call it working, no," and gave her a little smile, and after she'd paid him for fixing the camera, she walked outside the shop and just stood there for two and half minutes. Then she went back in and asked him if he wanted to get chips or something, and he walked out with her even though he wasn't off work for another two hours. And they got chips or something.  
  
He asked her back to his place, and she suspected - but wasn't quite sure - that it was a little larger on the inside, but she didn't say anything about it. Otherwise it looked normal, like any regular bloke had been living there, but he didn't have a balcony and she didn't see the telescope anywhere. "Do you ever, you know, look up at the stars?" she asked him, because they hadn't talked about time or space at all for the last few hours, but he just said that he'd tried to install a skylight when he first moved in, but the people who lived above him got angry.  
  
She stayed until very late that night, just talking to him. They caught each other up on the last few years, but neither of them mentioned anything about aliens. And two nights later, she went back, and then two nights after that, then the next night, and the next night, and after a while it was almost like they were dating. They never talked about the past, or the future, or other planets, although sometimes she wanted to, and she still didn't love him, not like she still loved the proper Doctor, but they got along well, and she even called him John once, but usually she just didn't say his name at all. And one day she noticed some grey hairs in his sideburns - all of a sudden, as though they'd grown overnight - and he even seemed mildly surprised that she was surprised. "Why shouldn't my hair turn grey?" he asked her, but she didn't have an answer for it, and anyway they were just a few hairs. But after this small shock, she all but forgot there'd been a time when he wasn't completely human.  
  
They did normal things. They went to movies, and they visited her parents and Tony, and he didn't exclaim that any part of humanity was particularly unique or brilliant, and after a while she stopped expecting him to. She almost, almost asked him once why they never went to see his parents, but caught herself just in time. She didn't know how he'd managed to forget everything about the past 900 or so years, or if he was just that good at pretending he'd forgotten for her sake, but they went on not talking about it, and eventually she moved in with him.  
  
At work, a message was received from a passing spaceship, but it was friendly. It was the most exciting thing that had happened in a long time, so she told him about it, even though she was nervous about his reaction. He just asked the right questions and said the right things, like anyone's boyfriend would, and it was nice being the one describing an adventure to him for once, even if it was a small thing like this, and the next day when she came home, she noticed that the inside of their flat no longer seemed to be slightly bigger than the outside. But then maybe it never had to begin with.  
  
One night, he took her to a park and they had a moonlit picnic, and when they were done eating, they lay back on their blanket and watched the Leonid meteor shower, holding hands and commenting on how beautiful shooting stars were, but never where they came from. And in the midst of it, he asked her to marry him, and she agreed. She did love him, she realized, but it wasn't because she'd loved him already; it was because she did now, again. She'd fallen in love with the new person that he was, and that was something completely different. She wanted to point that out to him, but she stopped herself. He was staring up into space, reflections of stars in his eyes like the tiny white sparks of a very large fire.  
  
Soon after announcing their engagement, she had herself removed from all projects at work that had anything to do with interdimensional travel or police call boxes. She became Rose Smith a month and a half later.  
  
And that night when they got home, after they made love for a very long time, she put her head on his chest right over his heart, and she put her hand where his other heart would have been, and she tapped her fingers very lightly to the same rhythm she was hearing, the same rhythm of her own heart, and he drifted to sleep that way. When she closed her eyes, she imagined what it would be like to have two heartbeats herself, and for the first time it occurred to her that that would be one too many.

She supposed, just before she fell asleep, that if she ever had two hearts, she would give at least one of them away.  
  
*

END


End file.
